Difficulty and frustration

When designing a game one of the most important points and harder to accomplish is to get a good difficulty balance.

Unfortunately some games try to lenghten the game by unreasonably increasing the difficulty at certain points, this is one of the worst mistakes a designer can make, you can't suddenly turn an accesible game into a really hardcore one.

It will frustrate the player and eventually make him loose interest in the game. It will also turn what was until that moment a nice experience into a bad one, and it won't really matter much if the game was enjoyable until that point.

It's better to have a good game with balanced difficulty that a longer one which frustrates the player.

I want to note that a hard difficulty is not the same as frustrating the player. You can have a difficult game or level as long as the player keeps getting some sensation of accomplishment or improvement. You can't make the player feel that he will never be able to do it, because then he will probably just stop playing the game.

Another thing that souldn't be done is make the last level or boss unfairly harder than the previous levels, the difficulty should generally ramp up. After a boss the difficulty should go down a little to give a sensation of relief and accomplishment.

It's important to note that the player should already have the necessary abilities to beat the boss, do not force him to learn new tricks or abilities while fighting the boss.

Welcome

Welcome to the evolving gameplay blog.

First of all I'll introduce myself. I'm 30 years old and I've been a gamer most of my life, since I was around 8 years old, professionally I'm a programmer and designer.

Also I'd like to note that since I'm from Spain, English is not my native language, so please bear with me.

In this blog I'll discuss different aspects and issues that arise when designing videogames, focusing on gameplay and design choices.

The intent of this blog is to try to evolve the way developers think about games, design the levels, the gameplay experience and the user interaction.

Hope you like it.